Yearly Archives: 2016

The Casement Project has crossed a lot of borders, so it’s no surprise that it continues beyond 2016 with the broadcast of I’m Roger Casement, a dance film directed by Dearbhla Walsh and produced for The Casement Project by COCO Television. The film will be shown on RTÉ One on 17 January at 23:10. It will also be available on RTÉ Player after that.

This broadcast was always an important element of the whole project, not only because it would be a chance to work with Dearbhla again, after the success of working with her on Match and Mo Mhórchoir Féin, but also because it was a way to reach people in their homes who might never set foot in a theatre to see contemporary dance. Because I believe in what dance has to offer to a wider public, it’s important for me to find ways to reach an audience beyond our important but smaller familiar dance constituency. Broadcast provides that opportunity. The film also gives The Casement Project a way of continuing to reach people through online streaming and other screenings.

I met someone this week involved with the GAA recently who told me that he showed Match to young players each year. He didn’t say what they thought about it, but I’m delighted that the film exists as a resource to stimulate whatever reactions it does. I hope I’m Roger Casement has as long a life. I’m excited for people to see the result of the beautiful work that many people put in to making it.

In placing The Casement Project in the frame of the ART:2016 and 1418NOW commemoration programmes , I wanted to show how dance helps us understand ourselves, our history and what we might do together in the future. It was encouraging to have the recognition of the commemoration programmes that a dance project could take a major place among artistic responses to 1916.

As the year draws to a close, Dance Ireland has commissioned Michael Seaver to reflect on the place of dance in Ireland in 2016. And despite the uncertainties that the year has brought us, the good news is that dance has proved what it can contribute. According to Michael:

The dance artists that took part in 1916 Centenary events made artistic choices that focussed
on the individual rather than scratching post-colonial wounds. The body and the unique individual person inhabiting the body was paramount, in contrast to the military commemorations: members of the Defence Forces marching down O’Connell Street in choreographed homogeneity and anonymity

Butterflies and Bones review: blood and thunder

Roger Casement is (again) centre stage, but this time it’s the dance world that’s exploring the many facets of his life

In the context of the remembering of 1916, in Ireland and the world, Butterflies and Bones is a dance theatre work shaped and sustained by the complex, heroic and contradictory life of Roger Casement: knight of the British Empire, outspoken international humanitarian, Antrim Protestant and rebel nationalist of his native Ireland. As each of the six lithe performers, four men and two women, quietly declares “I am Roger Casement” we are at the heart of Fearghus O’Conchúir’s mostly realised choreographic intent: to create a highly physical and visual performance where dance embodies and explores the multiple meanings of that life. This incorporates the symbolic, the gendered and the social aspects, then and now.

We begin at the end of a beginning: the exhumation of Casement’s body in Pentonville Prison for return to Ireland. O Conchúir’s recorded voice recounts the clinical uncovering of fragments of the quicklimed hanged body, with a disjointed list of ribs and vertebrae. On stage, an awkward solo is embraced into a healing ensemble phrase, featuring Mikel Aristegui, Theo Clinkard, Philip Connaughton, Bernadette Iglich, Matthew Morris and Liv O’Donoghue. The performance intimates the relentless parsing of Casement’s life, from vilified personal sexual history to emerging cultural nationalism, not in splinters but as a unified experience.

Dancers in T-shirts emblazoned with phrases from the ever contested Black Diaries, bring both visceral and delicate movement to cramped homosexual encounters, evoking both tenderness and urgent fulfilment. But, they move also to the different free-flowing grounded rhythms of the Congo or the Amazon, lands of heat and dust and exploited landscapes.

These are summoned by Ciaran O’Melia’s evocative lighting and simple staging and the outstanding sound design of Alma Kelliher. Later, as we move to the events of Easter 1916, her pacy design of single separated shots of the executed 1916 leaders is set against thundering artillery fire and we are immediately drawn to the fields of the Somme.

The dancers’ bodies and the staging all play transformative roles, most strikingly when Matthew Morris’s body bursts out of its clothing chrysalis into a mesmerising image of painted body art. Stacks of speakers are constantly shifted around, sometimes emanating sound but more often reconfigured as pieces of landscape, corners of concealment or mountainous piles of rocks.

Even the backdrop is whipped down to become a ship’s sail and in the final redemptive moments the floor of brown paper billows and falls, when lights on a horizon hold promise and dreams seem still alive.

In the discussion after our performance of Butterflies and Bonesin Belfast, one of the audience members spoke about the different ‘climates’ she’d observed throughout the piece and the transformations of bodies that she recognised. Describing herself as a foreigner and therefore unfamiliar with the Casement history, she wanted to know what the different climates represented. I responded that I didn’t ask the dancers to represent ideas or people. Instead I asked them to work at being present with the potential of transformation. I was looking, not for presence as a fixed essential being, but presence as an openness to what might be possible, a risk of being surprised, a presence that seems paradoxically to require of the performers a being centred so as to invite a creative decentredness that takes them beyond ‘themselves’.

Another audience member was moved by what she called the ‘gift’ of the dancers’ presence in the work. I had noticed her as we danced and it was clear that she was generously engaged with the performance throughout. So I think, the presence she felt was also a relation between us, audience and performers, that she enabled and welcomed. And the choreography invites those relations between all involved in it and is at its strongest when those relations are palpable, as they were in Belfast.

The more I think about why I make work in the way I do, the more I realise that I am not really choreographing to place myself in a dance tradition. I am part of a particular dance training and aesthetic lineage that I value, but I’m not sure that I am engaged in a conversation with other experts about the development of that lineage. Instead, I’m trying to think through why dance matters in the world, maybe especially (though not exclusively) in the limited part of the world in which I grew up. So my work might be a call to people who are interested in what dancing and its work with and through bodies, can change, for them and for others. That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate and applaud the refined expertise that’s developed in studios and shown on stages. But I am motivated by what that advanced R&D signifies/enables/predicts beyond its specialist confines.

With this in mind, I hope audiences recognise the performers on stage as fellow humans exploring their capacities and frailties in ways that remind us of what strange potential is available to all of us. I don’t want audiences to consider the performers as an alien species whose beautiful forms might be delightful but which have no relation to our common capacities. And yet, I realise the work is complicated (like life) and occasionally (like life) uncomfortable. It’s also uncomfortable for me to acknowledge that I may not be contributing to the development of this art form that has transformed my life, nor am I providing many people with entertainment. But what I’m doing is deliberate, and, for now, it’s what I’m compelled to do, grateful for the support of people and organisations who make it possible.

Belfast International Arts Festival asked me to write a blog post for their website. This is what I wrote:

05 October 2016

When I think of the choreography of The Casement Project, I’m trying to pay attention not only to the energy and movement between dancers in a studio or on a stage. I’m also thinking of where those stages are and where else The Casement Project can show up, whether that’s on a beach in Kerry, in the British Library in London, in a club in Kilkenny or in a studio in Dusseldorf. This a choreography that happens across national boundaries and in different media. Like Roger Casement, it’s a choreography that is mobile, multi-faceted and complicated!

Bringing The Casement Project to Northern Ireland was part of my plan from the beginning. Though he was born in Dublin, Casement’s family connections to Belfast, Ballymena and Ballycastle were strong and his travels, political and personal, brought him back often. He wanted to be buried overlooking Murlough Bay but when his bones were eventually repatriated in 1965, the British Government made it a condition of their release that they be buried in the Republic. Though Casement is renowned for his words – his reports denouncing human rights abuses in the Congo and in the Amazon, his poems, his letters, his diaries – his body, what it did and where it went, both in life and in death, has always been hugely political. It’s for that reason that I’ve found Casement such an important resource for thinking about the body in this moment of centenary commemoration, one hundred years after the Easter Rising and one hundred years since the midpoint of WW1.

Butterflies and Bones doesn’t try to tell Casement’s story. I value the liveness and surprising potential of bodies too much to try to tie them to a single narrative. And by making work in this way, I’m asking an audience to get involved, to bring their own perspectives, imagination and perceptions so that we can build something new together. Butterflies and Bones draws on detailed research into the complexities of Casement’s legacy to address contemporary questions of who belongs in the collective body, whose bodies have rights, what bodies are kept at bay. Casement’s international humanitarianism reminds us that we cannot think about the flourishing of a nation, without thinking of our responsibilities to those who exist beyond our borders. Post-Brexit Northern Ireland feels like an important place to be engaging with these ideas.

The Ulster Bank Belfast International Arts Festival is also an ideal context for us to performing in. I’ve presented work in the festival twice before: once thanks to a commission from Maiden Voyage Dance Company and, more recently, a solo I danced called Cure.

This year’s programme has important and sustaining lines of kinship between Butterflies and Bones and some of the other events. There are obvious connections to The Fever: Roger Casement in Dark Places, especially since we’ve learnt so much from Colm Tóibín’s work on Casement and had the privilege of having Olwen Fouéré read Fintan O’Toole’s The Nightmare of Empire for our Wake for Roger Casement at Kilkenny Arts Festival earlier on this year. But there are other kinships too: to the sweaty physicality of Jan Marten’s exciting Dog Days are Over and to the queer delight and challenge of Taylor Mac. I hope audiences will feel these lines of kinship that foster a community through the festival and beyond.

All kinds of people have contributed to The Casement Project. It’s important that we communicate and connect with a wide audience and having a good website is an essential part of being able to do that. A website provides people with information, it gives them a sense of the project, it’s a document of what’s happened and, as a result, it’s an integral part of the project in its own right.

I’m delighted that the Realex Web Awards 2016 have recognised the great job that Karen Hanratty and the team at Pixel Design have done on thecasementproject.ie. It won best microsite in this year’s awards – thanks to its superb design, and to its content too, I’d like to think! Karen designed my personal website www.fearghus.net and I appreciate the time she takes to listen to how I wanted the website to reflect the values of the whole project, as well as being functional and accessible.

Thanks to Annette Nugent and Kate O’Sullivan who are looking after The Casement Project‘s communications and who helped shaped the website too.

In the second of The Casement Project‘s appearances at Kilkenny Arts Festival, I shared a platform with journalist, Fintan O’Toole (who has written extensively about Casement), Dr. Barbara Dawson (Director of The Hugh Lane where two Casement exhibitions are running) and Prof. Roy Foster (historian and friend of The Casement Project). We were invited to have a public discussion about Casement and his legacy under the title of Body of Evidence. It was good to be able to talk about the history as inspiration, but also to recognise what is distinctive about an artist’s response to inspiration, and in particular my focus on the body – in its joy and pain – as a way of drawing contemporary resonance from Casement’s life and afterlife.

While the panel took Casement’s homosexuality as a fact, when Fintan, as chair, opened the discussion to the audience for questions, the first intervention was from a man who, seizing the microphone and making his way to the front of the room, clearly disagreed that Casement was gay and that the ‘Black’ diaries are authentic. He took exception to my description of the post-mortem examination of Casement that describes the dilation of his anus, pointing out that all our orifices would be dilated after a hanging. I don’t disagree with him, and wasn’t offering the post-mortem as proof of ‘the practices to which it was alleged the prisoner in question had been addicted’. Instead, I was interested in the invasive treatment of Casement’s body and in the subsequent discussion of that physical probing at the highest levels of British government.

Having Roy Foster next to me to deal with the majority forensic, historical conclusion that the diaries are genuine made me relaxed about the attack that this gentleman offered. I felt this man’s objections were particularly aimed at me, whom he addressed as Mr O’Connor, or, more particularly, aimed at my focus on the physical and sexual in Casement. Fintan O’Toole was a fierce defender and chair and refused to have the Q&A derailed. The audience was not sympathetic to the interruption either, especially when Roy Foster made clear the majority historical opinion. However that majority opinion is not total and it remains fascinating to me that Casement can provoke controversy and strong emotion one hundred years after his death.

In the company I was privileged to share at Kilkenny Arts Festival, both at The Wake for Roger Casement and at The Body of Evidence talk, I felt the kind of solidarity that makes it possible to brave the work that remains to be done around the body in Ireland.

The Casement Project pays close attention to the historical legacy of Casement’s life and afterlife. But that attention is in the service of figuring out what we need to be doing now: how we come together, live together, create the conditions where all kinds of people can flourish together. Una’s powerful eulogy, delivered at A Wake for Roger Casement at Kilkenny Arts Festival, reminds us what Casement’s legacy might mean now.

Homosexual chic
Forgeries make truth capeesh
The black books make white sheesh
Hanged on a comma, Abu Gharib on a leash
Beating on the door, a ghost with no apologies

All for Yeats’ screech
Out there scrawling, sucked such milk as he
Conrad was a writer, Cyclops winks one-liners
Overflow like guns to Howth, get the hell up out your seats
Connollies

_____________

And now a spoken word piece

Peace

Make it to Peru
Now what the hell you gonna do

Whips on black skin make it stripe like a zebra
As Yeezy would pronounce it
So go Kanye West young man
And report on a slaughter

Them boys cutting rubber trees
When all yer kin wanted was the rubber
Duck
Because they made the Sir silent
Stripped knighthoods like trees
The coconut shells gathering that rubber nectar

When nationalities were punchlines
Cartoons punched in magazines
And somehow someone gave enough of a fuck
To dissect the heart of darkness
And realised it beat you

But empires strike back
And you will now fall to treason
A waterboarded curtsey
Hold your knees up
You don’t get to control the reason
Or the threesome
Of patriot and prisoner and maybe Domhnall Gleeson
Would make a good fit for a biopic

England’s in difficulty
Ireland’s opportune
It sounds so weird now that we have to pretend everything between us is cool

Cyclops, “He’s an Irishman”
Kicking ball in a park in Belfast
With your name on it
Not that they’re a bit into names in the North
Mind you down South they changed it to Casement’s Fort
Maybe the ball kick is a Garryowen
That’s a dog
Tied up outside Barney Kiernan’s
And talk of Paddy Dignam
“I’m going to the Pisser, Burke”
And there I’ll read the paper
Of a martyr hanged, when the Sir is now silent
Stripped of a knighthood
Because the Dark one rises

Why do all our heroes end with a slab in Glasnevin
Musings over a pint in the Gravediggers
Pretending to remember them
Vowing to write more to our family
Our sisters, our Ninas
The nee-naw nee-naw
Of cops chasing down dealers

The slops make us slobs
And the talk turns to songs
Of thinking “Ho ro the rattlin’ bog”
Is about Ratlin Island
My vodka and lime
But you in the quick of it
The white knuckle powder
That makes dust of the bones in it
The white knuckle powder on the cistern of porcelain

It’s pretty fucking hard to be a pacifist on a German boat

But you though
All Malerone fever
And Pentonville reasoning
Couldn’t get the boat to vote

and what now
Would they follow you now Roger?
Would they follow you with drones
All the way to Monaghan
For the attack of the clones

Some capture moments
Others make legacies
That sounds like an Instagram hashtag
Of quotes over sunset allegories

An orphan at 13
Washed ashore on Good Friday
King Leopold the Second
Snorkelling out there
On a sand bank plucking starfish
An ear to a conch to hear stories of quares

Watch The Throne
Then watch the judge
Slide his glasses down his nose in court
What did you pick up in the ferry port
A secret, a passport stamp
Did they have Duty Free back then or were you on your Toblerone

But back to now
Back to the drones
Back to the incessant moaning of us tapping on phones
CAN YOU HEAR US
ARE YOU THERE
Can our echoes reach out
To your fizzing bones in a pit dug by louts?

Or do we hide you
Can we abide you
Can we pull you to now
Can we imagine a present where you could exist unbowed

Would we project on the Project
A mural of yours
Would you need planning or banning
Or petitions or Ts
Crossed and “i’s” dotted
And freeze framed in online identities
Giving speeches on corners instead of status updates
With billion dollar companies hosting all our opinions so great
Would you soapbox or succumb to the hysteria loop
The feedback of micro-controversies spat out each day anew

Put a halt to those sites
Brings tribeswomen fresh water
Well, well, well, there’s still reports to be written on slaughter

Which patriots do we choose to walk in the steps of
Roger that
And I pull from the past a nation on its knees
That no one can stop the march of
And no empire can appease
To you at your desk in 2016
Writing blog posts about Direct Provision
And Snapchatting the trip to Calais
There you are again
In the Observer on Sunday
Writing about Yazidis and British girls FGMd on their school holidays
If the papers could pay for you to go abroad
You’d come back with an eyepatch all Colvin and Fisk
Talking of risk and humanity and refugees in rubber ships
Pulled to shores and arrested, fainting and sick
Was that your boat or u boat with the fake life jackets?
The toddlers in the surf and the dirty right wing racket

Then one day a run to Leinster House
A brilliant riot
Us standing there shouting angry and violent…
What’s up what’s up motherfuckers where my rights at
You gone make me come down to Kildare Street with a begging cap
Mummy wrap your mouths unless your talk is going to speak the facts
Ask them where your daddy is tell them I just want my rights

The crowd moves forward and number EIGHT looms large
The zero tells the eight nice belt and we all feel in charge
At least for that moment when we thought we could change
With you at the forefront mentally switching lanes
Endlessly remaining not Brexit not lame
Not fascist not racist not hating not tame
But wild and ferocious because that’s what’s required
When politeness is a noose we have to wear like a bow tie

And I’M SO HIGH you’d say
In the smoking section of Mother
The night we won everything when gay men were equal but not their mothers
Or their lesbian sisters who were still women too
But you’d be there, Roger, giving us a clue
Colonel Mustard in the Dining Room with the candle stick too
Telling us to focus that victories must be multiple
They equality does not exist if one of us is unequal.

Joe Caslin would draw you on a George’s Street gable wall
All gorgeous and gay and dapper and tall
And the flat whites and dry shites
Of the dirty old town
Would find a way to embrace you, single now, Claddagh ring upside down
Could we approach you, in the corner of a cookie cutter cafe
Could we broach you like Tara on a tweed cape and just say
Roger, I see you. Roger, I know. Roger, we love you.
Roger, do you want dessert? Today it’s afagato.

But meanwhile we imagine
So few of us just do
We want the comfort and warmth, and the hum of a stew
We want your legacy back.
Watch the Throne.
We want you.

Despite seeing good dance pieces at Kilkenny Arts Festival over the past few years and having presented Tabernaclein the festival myself, I’ve never been completely happy with the relationship between performance and audience that Kilkenny’s Watergate stage sets up. One of the things I love about Kilkenny Arts Festival in general is the set of serendipitous connections that are established when visiting artists meet one another and when those connections are shared with an audience. The closing night concerts with their embarrassment and diversity of (mostly) musical talent is a template for the special magic that a festival like KAF can conjure. I’ve been having a conversation with festival director, Eugene Downes about how dance could feature in those moments of exchange: a solo or duet on the platform in St Canice’s where it is seen by a large general arts audience, rather than an evening length piece at the Watergate that is more likely to attract its smaller specialist audience. As an evangelist for dance, I’m keen to find and capitalise on those moments where dance can reach wide.

Fearghus – Photo John D Kelly

It’s in that context that we came to present A Wake for Roger Casement at KAF this year. I owe its form to both Eugene and to Cian O’Brien who mooted the possibility of The Casement Project appearing at KAF in the guise of a club night. – something that could happen late at night and could honour the contemporary relevance of Casement’s legacy with queer seriousness and sass. Much of the planning for the event took place while I was finishing Butterflies and Bones, and so I owe to Cian and to Eugene the line up we gathered for the night: Olwen Fouréré, Una Mullally, Martin McCann, Mangina Jones and me. It was clear, because of space and budget, that we couldn’t perform Butterflies and Bones, so, knowing I’d danced in the lecture demonstrations in Tralee and in New York, as well as in our Banna version of the show, I decided I’d bring the dancing to our wake. I’ve confessed elsewhere to the inordinate pleasure I still get from dancing, so there was a kind of selfishness as well as a pragmatism in offering my own dancing for the event. However, knowing that our format would only come together on the night and in circumstances over which we had limited control, I was also happier to oblige myself to be adaptable rather than ask any of the dancers to sign up to something yet to be determined. (This despite the fact that they generously sign up to performing in my work without my ever being able to explain what that will entail!)

Olwen Fouéré – Photo John D Kelly

What I did trust was the very capable and talented line up of contributors to The Wake for Roger Casement. In advance of our arriving in Kilkenny, I’d proposed a structure for the evening that placed dance alongside spoken text and song, all held together by the energy of Mangina Jones (who hosted the conclusion of Féile Fáilte) and happy dance tunes from DJ Martin McCann. Olwen read a piece about Casement which the National Concert Hall had commissioned Fintan O’Toole to write for its Imagining Homeevent, as part of its Ireland 2016 commemorations. The piece, called The Nightmare of Empire/The Dream of Europe, focuses on Casement in the Congo and his ability to read the connections between the exploitation of the indigenous population in the rubber trade and the flourishing of empire in London and Dublin where rubber products are everywhere. This link between Casement as anti-capitalist as well as anti-colonialist was the first of the significant contemporary resonances that our wake of Casement highlighted. Una Mullally’s enthralling and moving eulogy to Casement continued to read Casement’s legacy through a contemporary frame, imagining him as a foreign correspondent reporting on human rights abuses in Syria or on the shores of Europe, or supporting the campaign to repeal the 8th amendment. Una’s poetic and allusive eulogy caught me unawares when I first heard it in the sound check and I was moved by the way it summed up much of what I hoped we could achieve in The Casement Project.

Una Mullally – Photo John D Kelly

Mangina Jones – Photo John D Kelly

Mangina Jones started the choreography for the night with a procession through late night Kilkenny from our hotel to the Set Theatre where we performed. Her repertoire included an emotional rendition of ‘ The Parting Glass’ from the Celtic Women concerts, an over-emotional ‘Toxic’ by Britney Spears (during which I sustained significant knee grazes!) and an over-the-top ‘River Deep, Mountain High’, in which the body was gloriously celebrated.

Fearghus – Photo John D Kelly

And I danced three short solos, interspersed throughout the evening, not feeling the need to explain them, other than to let them be the alternative mode of feeling and communication that I think movement can be. Having the dancing alongside the spoken word and music gave it an equal platform to those more familiar art forms. And it seemed to work for the audience too, some of whom stopped me on the street the following day to give some positive feedback. (Though some were disconcerted that I was clearly older than the magical club lighting had suggested!)

Simon Callow – Photo John D Kelly

A treat that is typical of what KAF can make happen is that Simon Callow, who was a guest of the festival for that opening weekend, made an appearance at The Wake for Roger Casement, reading the letter about Casement’s post-mortem that Bernadette reads in Butterflies and Bones. It’s a letter that makes clear the state’s treatment of Casement as a pathologised, deviant body. So I followed it with the selection of Casement’s words, mostly from the Black Diaries, which indicate how Casement liked to use his body and which Matthew has arranged for Butterflies and Bones. I like how the material of The Casement Project is mobile, transferrable and a little contagious. It passes from one to another, transformed and transforming in the process. So I danced the solo that Theo dances at the end of the show, spoke the words that Matthew speaks in the show and danced the solo which I created ten years ago but which, transformed by Aoife, is now danced in new forms by the performers in Butterflies and Bones.